Multi-layer attention for person re-identification

Abstract

Person re-identification has been a significant application in the field of video surveillance analysis, yet it remains a challenging work to recognize the person of interest across disjoint cameras of different viewpoints. The factors affecting the identification results include the variation in background, different illumination conditions and the changes of human body poses. Existing person re-identification methods mainly focus on the feature extraction of the whole frame and metric learning functions. However, most of those algorithms treat different areas without distinction. It is worth emphasizing that different local regions make different contributions to image representaion, which exactly conforms to the attention mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a novel attention network which explores spatial attention in a convolutional neural network. Our algorithm learns the visual attention in multi-layer feature maps. The proposed model not only pays attention to the spatial probabilities of local regions, but also takes the features in different levels into consideration. We evaluate this multi-layer spatial attention model on three benchmark person re-identification datasets: Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC-reID. The experiment results validate the advances of our adopted network by comparing with state-of-the-art baselines.